In this last session we were looking at materials for vocabulary and grammar, particularly in digital forms. Also I was given an opportunity to present a vocabulary mobile app I have been working on together with my husband.

Here is the reflection of my little journey.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I have always been interested in educational technology. So the idea of creating an Ed Tech product has been in my mind for a while now. But my biggest inspiration, however, was Nick Robinson’s talk we watched in preparation for one of the sessions for this module. In the talk he mentioned the Start Up weekend they ran in Cambridge where people could compete by presenting their Ed Tech ideas, with the winner receiving funding for their project. What struck them (and me) is that out of 65 people who attended the event,   only 5% were from ELT and only one was a practising teacher. And she won. Which is not surprising since we, practising teachers , see our students day in and day out, we see their problems and we can come up with effective solutions how to solve them.

I can also see, with the advent of technology, more and more teachers developing their own apps and self-publishing their own books. I wanted to engage with Ed Tech too.

With this in mind, I decided to build a vocabulary app. Why another vocabulary app you would ask?  It’s a good question. There are hundreds and hundreds vocab apps available. The problem is all of them are designed for the students so they can work individually. There is hardly anything the teacher can use in class for the whole group. I wanted an app that:

– personalisable and allows me to use vocab that I covered with my students in class

-saves my preparation time and comes to my rescue when I run out of things to do in class

-engages my students and increases their talking time (and consequently reduces mine)

So I started looking at the current trends regarding vocabulary app design and came across two major trends. First is spaced repetition – a presentation method that gives you the information before you would forget it.  The idea is based around the Forgetting Curve – a term coined by German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus.

The curve hypothesizes the decline of memory retention over time and shows that our newly learned knowledge and made memories are halved in a matter of days unless the information is reviewed. The more we review such information, the stronger we make the memory, the longer we can remember it.

The second trend  is gamification  which is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts to maximise engagement through capturing the interest of learners and inspire them to continue learning.

Baring these trends in mind, I needed an idea for my app. However, with the limited budget and time (a full time job plus a full time university course) I wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel. Instead I was going to improve a proven old-school method. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Robert McLarty, the editor of  Modern English Teacher journal points out in the latest issues how ‘ many of our basic pedagogical ideas, acquired on teacher-training courses and professional development workshops over the years, underpin the new technologies’.

So I built my app around my favourite  classroom activity – Back to the Board.  I love this activity for many reasons:

• it’s communicative
• it’s a fun way to consolidate new vocab
• it lifts testing off the page
• and it’s a great warmer or filler

It does, however, have some major disadvantages.  Firstly, only limited number of students can talk at the same time. Secondly, some students don’t like to be in the spotlight. The aim of my app was to avoid such disadvantages.

This is how ExPLAYn was born. The idea of the app is that after the lesson the teacher can create a set where they record the vocabulary items that have been covered in the class. The app then sets a time limit and displays a word from the set. Students work in pairs with one holding a mobile device displaying words and trying to guess them and the other explaining the words. If the student who is guessing gets the word right, they tilt the screen and the app displays the next word. If, however, they struggle to remember the word  or their partner cannot explain the word, students could tilt the screen in the opposite direction, pass that word and continue the game. After the time runs out, the app shows the score based on the number of correct answers. It supplies students with a reward system and keeps them motivated to get a better score next time. The app also displays the words that were incorrect, informing the students what vocab items need more revision.

Having been testing the app for a couple of months now, I can see some great benefits for both teachers and students. Regarding the students, they now can work in pairs that makes everyone in the class involved.  The app can also be used in groups, individually or outside the classroom. It gives students the sense of ownership, with them relying on each other, rather than a teacher. It increases student to student interaction and helps them to develop strategies to cope when they don’t know the word.  For the teacher it provides a system for keeping a record of previously taught vocabulary, reduces their talking time and gives greater opportunity for monitoring and delayed error correction. But most importantly, I could really see that my students enjoy using the app. And as we know, motivation is an important part of language learning.

With all this in mind, I headed to our last seminar. Prior to my presentation, we had a task of discussing what makes a good vocabulary app. I was very interested in what my colleagues would say as they are my target audience.  First thing they mentioned is that an app should be a support tool for the teacher. Aleks made a point that most vocab apps are designed as a self-study tool for students and she simply doesn’t understand how they can be used in the classroom. As I mentioned earlier, that was exactly my problem with the currently available apps, and exPLAYn was designed to solve this problem. Stuart commented on how often apps try to cater for so many different things that in the end they don’t do any of them properly. In his opinion, instead of being ‘all –signing, all- dancing’ apps should focus on one feature and have a simple and clear interface. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what exPLAYn does.  Finally, we all agree that a good app should be fun and students need to be motivated to use it. My group suggested that to achieve this, an app should have a reward system and be more like a game – exactly the features of gamification. Stuart also suggested that it should be free to use, however, Aleks disagreed by saying that free apps usually mean they don’t have good quality and if you pay for it, it’s a better product.

All these comments gave me a lot of confidence as I felt that my app is meeting the needs of the teachers. My actual presentation went well and I got many comments and positive feedback from my colleagues. It was great to see how during a short demo when teachers were using the app they were extremely involved in the process and were having fun.

I was also expecting the obvious question: Why bother with the app if you could do this activity in other ways without the use of technology? I was asked why not tell students to write the words on bits of paper and they can ask each other in pairs. I’m sure we all have done this before, my personal issue, however, is that I tend to lose these bits of paper. Logging the words in the app provides a better and more systematic way of keeping a record of new vocabulary items.  Other teachers also mentioned that the handwriting of the students can be an issue, which I agree with.

What I was trying to demonstrate, however, is that instead of fearing and avoiding Ed Tech revolution, we, teachers, should get involved. I am lucky to have my husband Alex who is extremely interested in Ed Tech and brings his web development expertise to the table. However, we shouldn’t forget that Brighton is a digital hub and for every language teacher living and working here there are at least two developers. Brighton University runs various digital development courses and I’m sure you can find someone who will be happy to work on the project with you.   So if you have what you think a successful idea, the lack of your digital skills shouldn’t stop you. Make EdTech revolution work to your advantage!